Old Lamps for New

I had heard a great deal about Miss Beam’s school, but not till last week did the chance come to visit it.

The cabman drew up at a gate in an old wall, about a mile out of the town. I noticed as I was waiting for him to give me change that the Cathedral spire was visible down the road. I rang the bell, the gate automatically opened, and I found myself in a pleasant garden facing a square red ample Georgian house, with the thick white window-frames that to my eyes always suggest warmth and welcome and stability. There was no one in sight but a girl of about twelve, with her eyes covered with a bandage, who was being led carefully between the flower-beds by a little boy of some four years her junior. She stopped, and evidently asked who it was that had come in, and he seemed to be describing me to her. Then they passed on, and I entered the door which a smiling parlour-maid—that pretty sight!—was holding open for me.

Miss Beam was all that I had expected—middle-aged, authoritative, kindly, and understanding. Her hair was beginning to turn grey, and her figure had a fulness likely to be comforting to a homesick child.

We talked idly for a little while, and then I asked her some questions as to her scholastic methods, which I had heard were simple.

“Well,” she said, “we don’t as a matter of fact do much teaching here. The children that come to me—small girls and smaller boys—have very few formal lessons: no more than is needful to get application into them, and those only of the simplest—spelling, adding, subtracting, multiplying, writing. The rest is done by reading to them and by illustrated discourses, during which they have to sit still and keep their hands quiet. Practically there are no other lessons at all.”

“But I have heard so much,” I said, “about the originality of your system.”

Miss Beam smiled. “Ah, yes,” she said. “I am coming to that. The real aim of this school is not so much to instil thought as thoughtfulness—humanity, citizenship. That is the ideal I have always had, and happily there are parents good enough to trust me to try and put it into execution. Look out of the window a minute, will you?”